Tips and Activity Ideas to help you teach 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students how to summarize fiction and nonfiction / informational texts

Teaching Summarizing So Students Actually Understand

Teaching summarizing seems like it should be easy. When 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students summarize, they don’t have to come up with any of their own ideas – all they have to do is briefly tell the most important parts of a book or reading passage that they read. Sounds pretty easy…but it’s not. Teachers have all sorts of …

Use an online word cloud creator like Wordle to provide a visual aid to your main idea lessons.

Using a Word Cloud Generator for a Fun Main Idea Lesson

I really struggled when I first began to teach main idea. It seemed like curriculums only provided one way to teach it – read a short paragraph and determine the main idea of the paragraph. But there are other ways to teach main idea – and using the word cloud activity outlined below is an engaging and visual way to …

Main Idea Free Google Slides Slideshow for 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade

Practice Main Idea With This Free Slideshow

Use this free main idea slideshow to help you teach main idea to your 3rd grade or 4th grade students. The Google Slideshow asks students to think about how titles are related to main idea and details, how main ideas and details are related, to read a paragraph and identify what detail is unrelated to the main idea, and to write …

3 Fun Main Idea and Details Games / Center Ideas for Upper Elementary

Main Idea and Details Centers / Games for Upper Elementary

Giving 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students a main idea game / center activity to complete on their own can be risky. Main idea and supporting details is an abstract and tricky skill. This makes it difficult to find games or centers that students can complete both independently and successfully, and without reinforcing misconceptions. Below are some helpful ideas to …

Help your upper elementary students (third, fourth, and fifth grade) better understand how to find the main idea of a passage

Teaching Main Idea / Central Idea – Activities to Build Understanding

Teaching main idea and supporting details / central idea to 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students can be a very frustrating experience; it is such a difficult skill to understand.  Very few of my lessons seemed to have an effect on my 3rd grade students – either they understood how to find the main idea without my help, or they …